"And are in awe of our superior cleverness," I put in.

He laughed.

"Well, do the best you can," said he. "Only, you really must not brag and swagger, and you must get out of the habit of talking louder than any one else."

In the matter of dress, our task was easy. I had a fancy for bright colors and for strong contrasts; but I know I never indulged in clashes and discords. It was simply that in clothes I had the same taste as in pictures—the taste that made me prefer Rubens to Rembrandt. We cast out of my wardrobe everything in the least doubtful; and I gave away my jeweled canes, my pins and links and buttons for shirts and waistcoats except plain gold and pearls. I even left off the magnificent diamond I had worn for years on my little finger—but I didn't give away that stone; I put it by for resetting into an engagement ring. However, when I was as quietly dressed as it was possible for a gentleman to be, he still studied me dubiously, when he thought I wasn't seeing him. And I recall that he said once: "It's your face, Blacklock. If you could only manage to look less like a Spanish bull dashing into the ring, gazing joyfully about for somebody to gore and toss!"

"But I can't," said I. "And I wouldn't if I could—because that's me!"

One Saturday he brought a dancing master down to my country place—Dawn Hill, which I bought of the Dumont estate and completely remodeled. I saw what the man's business was the instant I looked at him. I left him in the hall and took Monson into my den.

"Not for me!" I protested. "There's where I draw the line."

"You don't understand," he urged. "This fellow, this Alphonse Lynch, out in the hall there, isn't going to teach you dancing so that you may dance, but so that you shall be less awkward in strange company."

"My walk suits me," said I. "And I don't fall over furniture or trip people up."

"True enough," he answered. "But you haven't the complete control of your body that'll make you unconscious of it when you're suddenly shot by a butler into a room full of people you suspect of being unfriendly and critical."

Not until he used his authority as trainer-in-full-charge, did I yield. It may seem absurd to some for a serious man like me solemnly to caper about in imitation of a scraping, grimacing French-Irishman; but Monson was right, and I haven't in the least minded the ridicule he has brought on me by tattling this and the other things everywhere, since he turned against me. It's nothing new under the sun for the crowds of chuckleheads to laugh where they ought to applaud; their habit is to laugh and to applaud in the wrong places. There's no part of my career that I'm prouder of than the whole of this thorough course of education in the trifles that are yet not trifles. To have been ignorant is no disgrace; the disgrace comes when one persists in ignorance and glories in it.

Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! No wonder the few strong men do about as they please with such a race of nincompoopery. If they didn't grow old and tired, what would they not do?

All this time I was giving myself—or thought I was giving myself—chiefly to my business, as usual. I know now that the new interests had in fact crowded the things down town far into the background, had impaired my judgment, had suspended my common sense; but I had no inkling of this then, The most important matter that was occupying me down town was pushing Textile up toward par. Langdon's doubts, little though they influenced me, still made enough of an impression to cause me to test the market. I sold for him at ninety, as he had directed; I sold in quantity every day. But no matter how much I unloaded, the price showed no tendency to break.

"This," said I to myself, "is a testimonial to the skill with which I prepared for my bull campaign." And that seemed to me—all unsuspicious as I then was—a sufficient explanation of the steadiness of the stock which I had worked to establish in the public confidence.

I felt that, if my matrimonial plans should turn out as I confidently expected, I should need a much larger fortune than I had—for I was determined that my wife should have an establishment second to none. Accordingly, I enlarged my original plan. I had intended to keep close to Langdon in that plunge; I believed I controlled the market, but I hadn't been in Wall Street twenty years without learning that the worst thunderbolts fall from cloudless skies. Without being in the least suspicious of Langdon, and simply acting on the general principle that surprise and treachery are part of the code of high finance, I had prepared to guard, first, against being taken in the rear by a secret change of plan on Langdon's part, and second, against being involved and overwhelmed by a sudden secret attack on him from some associate of his who might think he had laid himself open to successful raiding.

The market is especially dangerous toward Christmas and in the spring—toward Christmas the big fellows often juggle the stocks to get the money for their big Christmas gifts and alms; toward spring the motive is, of course, the extra summer expenses of their families and the commencement gifts to colleges. It was now late in the spring.

I say, I had intended to be cautious. I abandoned caution and rushed in boldly, feeling that the market was, in general, safe and that Textile was under my control—and that I was one of the kings of high finance, with my lucky star in the zenith. I decided to continue my bull campaign on my own account for two weeks after I had unloaded for Langdon, to continue it until the stock was at par. I had no difficulty in pushing it to ninety-seven, and I was not alarmed when I found myself loaded up with it, quoted at ninety-eight for the preferred and thirty for the common. I assumed that I was practically its only supporter and that it would slowly settle back as I slowly withdrew my support.

To my surprise, the stock did not yield immediately under my efforts to depress it. I sold more heavily; Textile continued to show a tendency to rise. I sold still more heavily; it broke a point or two, then steadied and rose again. Instead of sending out along my secret lines for inside information, as I should have done, and would have done had I not been in a state of hypnotized judgment—I went to Langdon! I who had been studying those scoundrels for twenty-odd years, and dealing directly with and for them for ten years!

He wasn't at his office; they told me there that they didn't know whether he was at his town house or at his place in the country—"probably in the country," said his down-town secretary, with elaborate carelessness. "He wouldn't be likely to stay away from the office or not to send for me, if he were in town, would he?"

It takes an uncommon good liar to lie to me when I'm on the alert. As I was determined to see Langdon, I was in so far on the alert. And I felt the fellow was lying. "That's reasonable," said I. "Call me up, if you hear from him. I want to see him—important, but not immediate." And I went away, having left the impression that I would make no further effort.

Incredible though it may seem, especially to those who know how careful I am to guard every point and to see in every friend a possible foe, I still did not suspect that smooth, that profound scoundrel. I do not use these epithets with heat. I flatter myself I am a connoisseur of finesse and can look even at my own affairs with judicial impartiality. And Langdon was, and is now, such a past master of finesse that he compels the admiration even of his victims. He's like one of those fabled Damascus blades. When he takes a leg off, the victim forgets to suffer in his amazement at the cleanness of the wound, in his incredulity that the leg is no longer part of him. "Langdon," said I to myself, "is a sly dog. No doubt he's busy about some woman, and has covered his tracks." Yet I ought, in the circumstances, instantly to have suspected that I was the person he was dodging.

I went up to his house. You, no doubt, have often seen and often admired its beautiful facade, so simple that it hides its own magnificence from all but experienced eyes, so perfect in its proportions that it hides the vastness of the palace of which it is the face. I have heard men say: "I'd like to have a house—a moderate-sized house—one about the size of Mowbray Langdon's—though perhaps a little more elegant, not so plain."

That's typical of the man. You have to look closely at him, to study him, before you appreciate how he has combined a thousand details of manner and dress into an appearance which, while it can not but impress the ordinary man with its distinction, suggests to all but the very observant the most modest plainness and simplicity. How few realize that simplicity must be profound, complex, studied, not to be and to appear crude and coarse. In those days that truth had just begun to dawn on me.

"Mr. Langdon isn't at home," said the servant.

I had been at his house once before; I knew he occupied the left side—the whole of the second floor, so shut off that it not only had a separate entrance, but also could not be reached by those in the right side of the house without descending to the entrance hall and ascending the left stairway.

"Just take my card to his private secretary, to Mr. Rathburn," said I. "Mr. Langdon has doubtless left a message for me."

The butler hesitated, yielded, showed me into the reception-room off the entrance hall. I waited a few seconds, then adventured the stairway to the left, up which he had disappeared. I entered the small salon in which Langdon had received me on my other visit. From the direction of an open door, I heard his voice—he was saying: "I am not at home. There's no message."

And still I did not realize that it was I he was avoiding!

"It's no use now, Langdon," I called cheerfully. "Beg pardon for seeming to intrude. I misunderstood—or didn't hear where the servant said I was to wait. However, no harm done. So long! I'm off." But I made no move toward the door by which I had entered; instead, I advanced a few feet nearer the door from which his voice had come.

After a brief—a very brief—pause, there came in Langdon's voice—laughing, not a trace of annoyance: "I might have known! Come in, Matt!"



IX. LANGDON AT HOME

I entered, with an amused glance at the butler, who was giving over his heavy countenance to a delightful exhibition of disgust and discomfiture. It was Langdon's sitting-room. He had had the carved antique oak interior of a room in an old French palace torn out and transported to New York and set up for him. I had made a study of that sort of thing, and at Dawn Hill had done something toward realizing my own ideas of the splendid. But a glance showed me that I was far surpassed. What I had done seemed in comparison like the composition of a school-boy beside an essay by Goldsmith or Hazlitt.

And in the midst of this quiet splendor sat, or rather lounged, Langdon, reading the newspapers. He was dressed in a dark blue velvet house-suit with facings and cords of blue silk a shade or so lighter than the suit. I had always thought him handsome; he looked now like a god. He was smoking a cigarette in an oriental holder nearly a foot long; but the air of the room, so perfect was the ventilation, instead of being scented with tobacco, had the odor of some fresh, clean, slightly saline perfume.

I think what was in my mind must have shown in my face, must have subtly flattered him, for, when I looked at him, he was giving me a look of genuine friendly kindliness. "This is—perfect, Langdon," said I. "And I think I'm a judge."

"Glad you like it," said he, trying to dissemble his satisfaction in so strongly impressing me.

"You must take me through your house sometime," I went on. "I'm going to build soon. No—don't be afraid I'll imitate. I'm too vain for that. But I want suggestions. I'm not ashamed to go to school to a master—to anybody, for that matter."

"Why do you build?" said he. "A town house is a nuisance. If I could induce my wife to take the children to the country to live, I'd dispose of this."

"That's it—the wife," said I.

"But you have no wife. At least—"

"No," I replied with a laugh. "Not yet. But I'm going to have."

I interpreted his expression then as amused cynicism. But I see a different meaning in it now. And I can recall his tone, can find a strained note which then escaped me in his usual mocking drawl.

"To marry?" said he. "I haven't heard of that."

"Nor no one else," said I.

"Except her," said he.

"Not even except her," said I. "But I've got my eye on her—and you know what that means with me."

"Yes, I know," drawled he. Then he added, with a curious twinkle which I do not now misunderstand: "We have somewhat the same weakness."

"I shouldn't call it a weakness," said I. "It's the quality that makes the chief difference between us and the common run—the fellows that have no purposes beyond getting comfortably through each day—"

"And getting real happiness," he interrupted, with just a tinge of bitterness.

"We wouldn't think it happiness," was my answer.

"The worse for us," he replied. "We're under the tyranny of to-morrow—and happiness is impossible."

"May I look at your bedroom?" I asked.

"Certainly," he assented.

I pushed open the door he indicated. At first glimpse I was disappointed. The big room looked like a section of a hospital ward. It wasn't until I had taken a second and very careful look at the tiled floor, walls, ceiling, that I noted that those plain smooth tiles were of the very finest, were probably of his own designing, certainly had been imported from some great Dutch or German kiln. Not an inch of drapery, not a picture, nothing that could hold dust or germs anywhere; a square of sanitary matting by the bed; another square opposite an elaborate exercising machine. The bed was of the simplest metallic construction—but I noted that the metal was the finest bronze. On it was a thin, hard mattress. You could wash the big room down and out with the hose, without doing any damage.

"Quite a contrast," said I, glancing from the one room to the other.

"My architect is a crank on sanitation," he explained, from his lounge.

I noted that the windows were huge—to admit floods of light—and that they were hermetically sealed so that the air should be only the pure air supplied from the ventilating apparatus. To many people that room would have seemed a cheaply got together cell; to me, once I had examined it, it was evidently built at enormous cost and represented an extravagance of common-sense luxury which was more than princely or royal.

Suddenly my mind reverted to my business. "How do you account for the steadiness of Textile, Langdon?" I asked, returning to the carved sitting-room and trying to put those surroundings out of my mind.

"I don't account for it," was his languid, uninterested reply.

"Any of your people under the market?"

"It isn't to my interest to have it supported, is it?" he replied.

"I know that," I admitted. "But why doesn't it drop?"

"Those letters of yours may have overeducated the public in confidence," suggested he. "Your followers have the habit of believing implicitly whatever you say."

"Yes, but I haven't written a line about Textile for nearly a month now," I pretended to object, my vanity fairly purring with pleasure.

"That's the only reason I can give," said he.

"You are sure none of your people is supporting the stock?" I asked, as a form and not for information; for I thought I knew they weren't—I trusted him to have seen to that.

"I'd like to get my holdings back," said he. "I can't buy until it's down. And I know none of my people would dare support it."

You will notice he did not say directly that he was not himself supporting the market; he simply so answered me that I, not suspecting him, would think he reassured me. There is another of those mysteries of conscience. Had it been necessary, Langdon would have told me the lie flat and direct, would have told it without a tremor of the voice or a blink of the eye, would have lied to me as I have heard him, and almost all the big fellows, lie under oath before courts and legislative committees; yet, so long as it was possible, he would thus lie to me with lies that were not lies. As if negative lies are not falser and more cowardly than positive lies, because securer and more deceptive.

"Well, then, the price must break," said I, "It won't be many days before the public begins to realize that there isn't anybody under Textile."

"No sharp break!" he said carelessly. "No panic!"

"I'll see to that," replied I, with not a shadow of a notion of the subtlety behind his warning.

"I hope it will break soon," he then said, adding in his friendliest voice with what I now know was malignant treachery: "You owe it to me to bring it down." That meant that he wished me to increase my already far too heavy and dangerous line of shorts.

Just then a voice—a woman's voice—came from the salon. "May I come in? Do I interrupt?" it said, and its tone struck me as having in it something of plaintive appeal.

"Excuse me a moment, Blacklock," said he, rising with what was for him haste.

But he was too late. The woman entered, searching the room with a piercing, suspicious gaze. At once I saw, behind that look, a jealousy that pounced on every object that came into its view, and studied it with a hope that feared and a fear that hoped. When her eyes had toured the room, they paused upon him, seemed to be saying: "You've baffled me again, but I'm not discouraged. I shall catch you yet."

"Well, my dear?" said Langdon, whom she seemed faintly to amuse. "It's only Mr. Blacklock. Mr. Blacklock, my wife."

I bowed; she looked coldly at me, and her slight nod was more than a hint that she wished to be left alone with her husband.

I said to him: "Well, I'll be off. Thank you for—"

"One moment," he interrupted. Then to his wife: "Anything special?"

She flushed. "No—nothing special. I just came to see you. But if I am disturbing you—as usual—"

"Not at all," said he. "When Blacklock and I have finished, I'll come to you. It won't be longer than an hour—or so."

"Is that all?" she said almost savagely. Evidently she was one of those women who dare not make "scenes" with their husbands in private and so are compelled to take advantage of the presence of strangers to ease their minds. She was an extremely pretty woman, would have been beautiful but for the worn, strained, nervous look that probably came from her jealousy. She was small in stature; her figure was approaching that stage at which a woman is called "well rounded" by the charitable, fat by the frank and accurate. A few years more and she would be hunting down and destroying early photographs. There was in the arrangement of her hair and in the details of her toilet—as well as in her giving way to her tendency to fat—that carelessness that so many women allow themselves, once they are safely married to a man they care for.

"Curious," thought I, "that being married to him should make her feel secure enough of him to let herself go, although her instinct is warning her all the time that she isn't in the least sure of him. Her laziness must be stronger than her love—her laziness or her vanity."

While I was thus sizing her up, she was reluctantly leaving. She didn't even give me the courtesy of a bow—whether from self-absorption or from haughtiness I don't know; probably from both. She was a Western woman, and when those Western women do become perverts to New York's gospel of snobbishness, they are the worst snobs in the push. Langdon, regardless of my presence, looked after her with a faintly amused, faintly contemptuous expression that—well, it didn't fit in with my notion of what constitutes a gentleman. In fact, I didn't know which of them had come off the worse in that brief encounter in my presence. It was my first glimpse of a fashionable behind-the-scenes, and it made a profound impression upon me—an impression that has grown deeper as I have learned how much of the typical there was in it. Dirt looks worse in the midst of finery than where one naturally expects to find it—looks worse, and is worse.

When we were seated again, Langdon, after a few reflective puffs at his cigarette, said: "So you're about to marry?"

"I hope so," said I. "But as I haven't asked her yet, I can't be quite sure." For obvious reasons I wasn't so enamored of the idea of matrimony as I had been a few minutes before.

"I trust you're making a sensible marriage," said he. "If the part that may be glamour should by chance rub clean away, there ought to be something to make one feel he wasn't wholly an ass."

"Very sensible," I replied with emphasis. "I want the woman. I need her."

He inspected the coal of his cigarette, lifting his eyebrows at it. Presently he said: "And she?"

"I don't know how she feels about it—as I told you," I replied curtly. In spite of myself, my eyes shifted and my skin began to burn. "By the way, Langdon, what's the name of your architect?"

"Wilder and Marcy," said he. "They're fairly satisfactory, if you tell 'em exactly what you want and watch 'em all the time. They're perfectly conventional and so can't distinguish between originality that's artistic and originality that's only bizarre. They're like most people—they keep to the beaten track and fight tooth and nail against being drawn out of it and against those who do go out of it."

"I'll have a talk with Marcy this very day," said I.

"Oh, you're in a hurry!" He laughed. "And you haven't asked her. You remind me of that Greek philosopher who was in love with Lais. They asked him: 'But does she love you?' And he said: 'One does not inquire of the fish one likes whether it likes one.'"

I flushed. "You'll pardon me, Langdon," said I, "but I don't like that. It isn't my attitude at all toward—the right sort of women."

He looked half-quizzical, half-apologetic. "Ah, to be sure," said he. "I forgot you weren't a married man."

"I don't think I'll ever lose the belief that there's a quality in a good woman for a man to—to respect and look up to."

"I envy you," said he, but his eyes were mocking still. I saw he was a little disdainful of my rebuking him—and angry at me, too.

"Woman's a subject of conversation that men ought to avoid," said I easily—for, having set myself right, I felt I could afford to smooth him down.

"Well, good-by—good luck—or, if I may be permitted to say it to one so touchy, the kind of luck you're bent on having, whether it's good or bad."

"If my luck ain't good, I'll make it good," said I with a laugh.

And so I left him, with a look in his eyes that came back to me long afterward when I realized the full meaning of that apparently almost commonplace interview.

That same day I began to plunge on Textile, watching the market closely, that I might go more slowly should there be signs of a dangerous break—for no more than Langdon did I want a sudden panicky slump. The price held steady, however; but I, fool that I was, certain the fall must come, plunged on, digging the pit for my own destruction deeper and deeper.



X. TWO "PILLARS OF SOCIETY"

I was neither seeing nor hearing from the Ellerslys, father or son; but, as I knew why, I was not disquieted. I had made them temporarily easy in their finances just before that dinner, and they, being fatuous, incurable optimists, were probably imagining they would never need me again. I did not disturb them until Monson and I had got my education so well under way that even I, always severe in self-criticism and now merciless, was compelled to admit to myself a distinct change for the better. You know how it is with a boy at the "growing age"—how he bursts out of clothes and ideas of life almost as fast as they are supplied him, so swiftly is he transforming into a man. Well, I think it is much that way with us Americans all our lives; we continue on and on at the growing age. And if one of us puts his or her mind hard upon growth in some particular direction, you see almost overnight a development fledged to the last tail-feathers and tip of top-knot where there was nothing at all. What miracles can be wrought by an open mind and a keen sense of the cumulative power of the unwasted minute! All this apropos of a very trivial matter, you may be thinking. But, be careful how you judge what is trivial and what important in a universe built up of atoms.

However—When my education seemed far enough advanced, I sent for Sam. He, after his footless fashion, didn't bother to acknowledge my note. His margin account with me was at the moment straight; I turned to his father. I had my cashier send him a formal, type-written letter signed Blacklock & Co., informing him that his account was overdrawn and that we "would be obliged if he would give the matter his immediate attention." The note must have reached him the following morning; but he did not come until, after waiting three days, "we" sent him a sharp demand for a check for the balance due us.

A pleasing, aristocratic-looking figure he made as he entered my office, with his air of the man whose hands have never known the stains of toil, with his manner of having always received deferential treatment. There was no pretense in my curt greeting, my tone of "despatch your business, sir, and be gone"; for I was both busy and much irritated against him. "I guess you want to see our cashier," said I, after giving him a hasty, absent-minded hand-shake. "My boy out there will take you to him."

The old do-nothing's face lost its confident, condescending expression. His lip quivered, and I think there were tears in his bad, dim, gray-green eyes. I suppose he thought his a profoundly pathetic case; no doubt he hadn't the remotest conception what he really was—and no doubt, also, there are many who would honestly take his view. As if the fact that he was born with all possible advantages did not make him and his plight inexcusable. It passes my comprehension why people of his sort, when suffering from the calamities they have deliberately brought upon themselves by laziness and self-indulgence and extravagance, should get a sympathy that is withheld from those of the honest human rank and file falling into far more real misfortunes not of their own making.

"No, my dear Blacklock," said he, cringing now as easily as he had condescended—how to cringe and how to condescend are taught at the same school, the one he had gone to all his life. "It is you I want to talk with. And, first, I owe you my apologies. I know you'll make allowances for one who was never trained to business methods. I've always been like a child in those matters."

"You frighten me," said I. "The last 'gentleman' who came throwing me off my guard with that plea was shrewd enough to get away with a very large sum of my hard-earned money. Besides"—and I was laughing, though not too good-naturedly—"I've noticed that you 'gentlemen' become vague about business only when the balance is against you. When it's in your favor, you manage to get your minds on business long enough to collect to the last fraction of a cent."

He heartily echoed my laugh. "I only wish I were clever," said he. "However, I've come to ask your indulgence. I'd have been here before, but those who owe me have been putting me off. And they're of the sort of people whom it's impossible to press."

"I'd like to accommodate you further," said I, shedding that last little hint as a cliff sheds rain, "but your account has been in an unsatisfactory state for nearly a month now."

"I'm sure you'll give me a few days longer," was his easy reply, as if we were discussing a trifle. "By the way, you haven't been to see us yet. Only this morning my wife was wondering when you'd come. You quite captivated her, Blacklock. Can't you dine with us to-morrow night—no, Sunday—at eight? We're having in a few people I think you'd like to meet."

If any one imagines that this bald, businesslike way of putting it set my teeth on edge, let him dismiss the idea; my nerves had been too long accustomed to the feel of the harsh facts of life. It is evidence of the shrewdness of the old fellow at character-reading that he wasted none of his silk and velvet pretenses upon me, and so saved his time and mine. Probably he wished me to see that I need have no timidity or false shame in dealing with him, that when the time came to talk business I was free to talk it in my own straight fashion.

"Glad to come," said I, wishing to be rid of him, now that my point was gained. "We'll let the account stand open for the present—I rather think your stocks are going up. Give my regards to—the ladies, please, especially to Miss Anita."

He winced, but thanked me graciously; gave me his soft, fine hand to shake and departed, as eager to be off as I to be rid of him. "Sunday next—at eight," were his last words. "Don't fail us"—that in the tone of a king addressing some obscure person whom he had commanded to court. It may be that old Ellersly was wholly unconscious of his superciliousness, fancied he was treating me as if I were almost an equal; but I suspect he rather accentuated his natural manner, with the idea of impressing upon me that in our deal he was giving at least as much as I.

I recall that I thought about him for several minutes after he was gone—philosophized on the folly of a man's deliberately weaving a net to entangle himself. As if any man was ever caught in any net not of his own weaving and setting; as if I myself were not just then working at the last row of meshes of a net in which I was to ensnare myself.

My petty and inevitable success with that helpless creature added amazingly, ludicrously, to that dangerous elation which, as I can now see, had been growing in me ever since the day Roebuck yielded so readily to my demands as to National Coal. The whole trouble with me was that up to that time I had won all my victories by the plainest kind of straightaway hard work. I was imagining myself victor in contests of wit against wit, when, in fact, no one with any especial equipment of brains had ever opposed me; all the really strong men had been helping me because they found me useful. Too easy success—there is the clue to the wild folly of my performances in those days, a folly that seems utterly inconsistent with the reputation for shrewdness I had, and seemed to have earned.

I can find a certain small amount of legitimate excuse for my falling under Langdon's spell. He had, and has, fascinations, through personal magnetism, which it is hardly in human nature to resist. But for my self-hypnotism in the case of Roebuck, I find no excuse whatever for myself.

He sent for me and told me what share in National Coal they had decided to give me for my Manasquale mines. "Langdon and Melville," said he, "think me too liberal; far too liberal, my boy. But I insisted—in your case I felt we could afford to be generous as well as just." All this with an air that was a combination of the pastor and the parent.

I can't even offer the excuse of not having seen that he was a hypocrite. I felt his hypocrisy at once, and my first impulse was to jump for my breastworks. But instantly my vanity got behind me, held me in the open, pushed me on toward him. If you will notice, almost all "confidence" games rely for success chiefly upon enlisting a man's vanity to play the traitor to his judgment. So, instead of reading his liberality as plain proof of intended treachery, I read it as plain proof of my own greatness, and of the fear it had inspired in old Roebuck. Laugh with me if you like; but, before you laugh at me, think carefully—those of you who have ever put yourselves to the test on the field of action—think carefully whether you have never found that your head decoration which you thought a crown was in reality the peaked and belled cap of the fool.

But my vanity was not done with me. Led on by it, I proceeded to have one of those ridiculous "generous impulses"—I persuaded myself that there must be some decency in this liberality, in addition to the prudence which I flattered myself was the chief cause. "I have been unjust to Roebuck," I thought. "I have been misjudging his character." And incredible though it seems, I said to him with a good deal of genuine emotion: "I don't know how to thank you, Mr. Roebuck. And, instead of trying, I want to apologize to you. I have thought many hard things against you; have spoken some of them. I had better have been attending to my own conscience, instead of criticizing yours."

I had often thought his face about the most repulsive, hypocrisy-glozed concourse of evil passions that ever fronted a fiend in the flesh. It had seemed to me the fitting result of a long career which, according to common report, was stained with murder, with rapacity and heartless cruelty, with the most brutal secret sensuality, and which had left in its wake the ruins of lives and hearts and fortunes innumerable. I had looked on the vast wealth he had heaped mountain high as a monument to devil-daring—other men had, no doubt, dreamed of doing the ferocious things he had done, but their weak, human hearts failed when it came to executing such horrible acts, and they had to be content with smaller fortunes, with the comparatively small fruits of their comparatively small infamies. He had dared all, had won; the most powerful bowed with quaking knees before him, and trembled lest they might, by a blundering look or word, excite his anger and cause him to snatch their possessions from them.

Thus I had regarded him, accepting the universal judgment, believing the thousand and one stories. But as his eyes, softened by his hugely generous act, beamed upon me now, I was amazed that I had so misjudged him. In that face which I had thought frightful there was, to my hypnotized gaze, the look of strong, sincere—yes, holy—beauty and power—the look of an archangel.

"Thank you, Blacklock," said he, in a voice that made me feel as if I were a little boy in the crossroads church, believing I could almost see the angels floating above the heads of the singers in the choir behind the preacher. "Thank you. I am not surprised that you have misjudged me. God has given me a great work to do, and those who do His will in this wicked world must expect martyrdom. I should never have had the courage to do what I have done, what He has done through me, had He not guided my every step. You are not a religious man?"

"I try to do what's square," said I. "But I'd prefer not to talk about it."

"That's right! That's right!" he approved earnestly. "A man's religion is a matter between himself and his God. But I hope, Matthew, you will never forget that, unless you have daily, hourly communion with Almighty God, you will never be able to bear the great burdens, to do the great work fearlessly, disregarding the lies of the wicked, and, hardest of all to endure, the honestly-mistaken judgments of honest men."

"I'll look into it," said I. And I don't know to what lengths of foolish speech I should have gone had I not been saved by an office boy interrupting with a card for him.

"Ah, here's Walters now," said he. Then to the boy: "Bring him in when I ring."

I rose to go.

"No, sit down, Blacklock," he insisted. "You are in with us now, and you may learn something by seeing how I deal with the larger problems that face men in these large undertakings, the problems that have faced me in each new enterprise I have inaugurated to the glory of God."

Naturally, I accepted with enthusiasm.

You would not believe what a mood I had by this time been worked into by my rampant and raging vanity and emotionalism and by his snake-like charming. "Thank you," I said, with an energetic warmth that must have secretly amused him mightily.

"When my reorganization of the iron industry proved such a great success, and God rewarded my labors with large returns," he went on, "I looked about me to see what new work He wished me to undertake, how He wished me to invest His profits. And I saw the coal industry and the coal-carrying railroads in confusion, with waste on every side, and godless competition. Thousands of widows and orphans who had invested in coal railways and mines were getting no returns. Labor was fitfully employed, owing to alternations of over-production and no production at all. I saw my work ready for my hand. And now we are bringing order out of chaos. This man Walters, useful up to a certain point, has become insolent, corrupt, a stumbling-block in our way." Here he pressed the button of his electric bell.



XI. WHEN A MAN IS NOT A MAN

Walters entered. He was one of the great railway presidents, was universally regarded as a power, though I, of course, knew that he, like so many other presidents of railways, of individual corporations, of banks, of insurance companies, and high political officials in cities, states and the nation, was little more than a figurehead put up and used by the inside financial ring. As he shifted from leg to leg, holding his hat and trying to steady his twitching upper lip, he looked as one of his smallest section-bosses would have looked, if called up for a wigging.

Roebuck shook hands cordially with him, responded to his nervous glance at me with:

"Blacklock is practically in our directory." We all sat, then Roebuck began in his kindliest tone:

"We have decided, Walters, that we must give your place to a stronger man. Your gross receipts, outside of coal, have fallen rapidly and steadily for the past three quarters. You were put into the presidency to bring them up. They have shown no change beyond what might have been expected in the natural fluctuations of freight. We calculated on resuming dividends a year ago. We have barely been able to meet the interest on our bonds."

"But, Mr. Roebuck," pleaded Walters, "you doubled the bonded indebtedness of the road just before I took charge."

"The money went into improvements, into increasing your facilities, did it not?" inquired Roebuck, his paw as soft as a playful tiger's.

"Part of it," said Walters. "But you remember the reorganizing syndicate got five millions, and then the contracts for the new work had to be given to construction companies in which directors of the road were silent partners. Then they are interested in the supply companies from which I must buy. You know what all that means, Mr. Roebuck."

"No doubt," said Roebuck, still smooth and soft. "But if there was waste, you should have reported—"

"To whom?" demanded Walters. "Every one of our directors, including yourself, Mr. Roebuck, is a stock-holder—a large stock-holder—in one or more of those companies."

"Have you proof of this, Walters?" asked Roebuck, looking profoundly shocked. "It's a very grave charge—a criminal charge."

"Proof?" said Walters, "You know how that is. The real books of all big companies are kept in the memories of the directors—and mighty treacherous memories they are." This with a nervous laugh. "As for the holdings of directors in construction and supply companies—most of those holdings are in other names—all of them are disguised where the connection is direct."

Roebuck shook his head sadly. "You admit, then, that you have allowed millions of the road's money to be wasted, that you made no complaint, no effort to stop the waste; and your only defense is that you suspect the directors of fraud. And you accuse them to excuse yourself—accuse them with no proof. Were you in any of those companies, Walters?"

"No," he said, his eyes shifting.

Roebuck's face grew stern. "You bought two hundred thousand dollars of the last issue of government bonds, they tell me, with your two years' profits from the Western Railway Construction Company."

"I bought no bonds," blustered Walters. "What money I have I made out of speculating in the stock of my road—on legitimate inside information."

"Your uncle in Wilkesbarre, I meant," pursued Roebuck.

Walters reddened, looked straight at Roebuck without speaking.

"Do you still deny?" demanded Roebuck.

"I saw everybody—everybody—grafting," said Walters boldly, "and I thought I might as well take my share. It's part of the business." Then he added cynically: "That's the way it is nowadays. The lower ones see the higher ones raking off, and they rake off, too—down to conductors and brakemen. We caught some trackwalkers in a conspiracy to dispose of the discarded ties and rails the other day." He laughed. "We jailed them."

"If you can show that any director has taken anything that did not belong to him, if you can show that a single contract you let to a construction or a supply company—except, of course, the contracts you let to yourself—of them I know nothing, suspect much—if you can show one instance of these criminal doings, Mr. Walters, I shall back you up with all my power in prosecution."

"Of course I can't show it," cried Walters. "If I tried, wouldn't they ruin and disgrace me, perhaps send me to the penitentiary? Wasn't I the one that passed on and signed their contracts? And wouldn't they—wouldn't you, Mr. Roebuck—have fired me if I had refused to sign?"

"Excuses, excuses, Walters," was Roebuck's answer, with a sad, disappointed look, as if he had hoped Walters would make a brighter showing for himself. "How many times have you yourself talked to me of this eternal excuse habit of men who fail? And if I expended my limited brain-power in looking into all the excuses and explanations, what energy or time would I have for constructive work? All I can do is to select a man for a position and to judge him by results. You were put in charge to produce dividends. You haven't produced them. I'm sorry, and I venture to hope that things are not so bad as you make out in your eagerness to excuse yourself. For the sake of old times, Tom, I ignore your angry insinuations against me. I try to be just, and to be just one must always be impersonal."

"Well," said Walters with an air of desperation, "give me another year, Mr. Roebuck, and I'll produce results all right. I'll break the agreements and cut rates. I'll freeze out the branch roads and our minority stock-holders, I'll keep the books so that all the expert accountants in New York couldn't untangle them. I'll wink at and commit and order committed all the necessary crimes. I don't know why I've been so squeamish, when there were so many penitentiary offenses that I did consent to, and, for that matter, commit, without a quiver. I thought I ought to draw the line somewhere—and I drew it at keeping my personal word and at keeping the books reasonably straight. But I'll go the limit."

I'll never forget Roebuck's expression; it was perfect, simply perfect—a great and good man outraged beyond endurance, but a Christian still. "You have made it impossible for me to temper justice with mercy, Walters," said he. "If it were not for the long years of association, for the affection for you which has grown up in me, I should hand you over to the fate you have earned. You tell me you have been committing crimes in my service. You tell me you will commit more and greater crimes. I can scarcely believe my own ears."

Walters laughed scornfully—the reckless laugh of a man who suddenly sees that he is cornered and must fight for his life. "Rot!" he jeered. "Rot! You always have been a wonder at juggling with your conscience. But do you expect me to believe you think yourself innocent because you do not yourself execute the orders you issue—orders that can be carried out only by committing crimes?" Walters was now beside himself with rage. He gave the reins to that high horse he had been riding ever since he was promoted to the presidency of the great coal road. He began to lay on whip and spur. "Do you think," he cried to Roebuck, "the blood of those five hundred men drowned in the Pequot mine is not on your hands—your head? You, who ordered John Wilkinson to suppress the competition the Pequot was giving you, ordered him in such a way that he knew the alternative was his own ruin? He shot himself—yet he had as good an excuse as you, for he, too, passed on the order until it got to the poor fireman—that wretched fellow they sent to the penitentiary for life? And as sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will some day do a long, long sentence in whatever hell there is, for letting that wretch rot in prison—yes, and for John Wilkinson's suicide, and for the lives of those five hundred drowned. Your pensions to the widows and orphans can't save you."

I listened to this tirade astounded. Used as I was to men losing their heads through vanity, I could not credit my own ears and eyes when they reported to me this insane exhibition. I looked at Roebuck. He was wearing an expression of beatific patience; he would have made a fine study for a picture of the martyr at the stake.

"I forgive you, Tom," he said, when Walters stopped for breath. "Your own sinful heart makes you see the black of sin upon everything. I had heard that you were going about making loud boasts of your power over your employers, but I tried not to believe it. I see now that you have, indeed, lost your senses. Your prosperity has been too much for your good sense." He sighed mournfully. "I shall not interfere to prevent your getting a position elsewhere," he continued. "But after what you have confessed, after your slanders, how can I put you back in your old place out West, as I intended? How can I continue the interest in you and care for your career that I have had, in spite of all your shortcomings? I who raised you up from a clerk."

"Raised me up as you fellows always raise men up—because you find them clever at doing your dirty work. I was a decent, honest fellow when you first took notice of me and tempted me. But, by God, Mr. Roebuck, if I've sold out beyond hope of living decent again, I'll have my price—to the last cent. You've got to leave me where I am or give me a place and salary equally as good." This Walters said blusteringly, but beneath I could detect the beginnings of a whine.

"You are angry, Tom," said Roebuck soothingly. "I have hurt your vanity—it is one of the heaviest crosses I have to bear, that I must be continually hurting the vanity of men. Go away and—and calm down. Think the situation over coolly; then come and apologize to me, and I will do what I can to help you. As for your threats—when you are calm, you will see how idle they are."

Walters gave a sort of groan; and though I, blinded by my prejudices in favor of Roebuck and of the crowd with whom my interests lay, had been feeling that he was an impudent and crazy ingrate, I pitied him.

"What proofs have I got?" he said desperately. "If I show up the things I know about, I show up myself, and everybody will say I'm lying about you and the others in the effort to save myself. The newspapers would denounce me as a treacherous liar—you fellows own or control or foozle them in one way and another. And if I was believed, who'd prosecute you and what court'd condemn you? Don't you own both political parties and make all the tickets, and can't you ruin any office-holders who lifted a finger against you? What a hell of a state of affairs!"

A swifter or a weaker descent I never witnessed. My pity changed to contempt. "This fellow, with his great reputation," thought I, "is a fool and a knave, and a weak one at that."

"Go away now, Tom," said Roebuck.

"When you're master of yourself again, come to see me."

"Master of myself!" cried Walters bitterly. "Who that's got anything to lose is master of himself in this country?" With shoulders sagging and a sort of stumble in his gait, he went toward the door. He paused there to say: "I've served too long, Mr. Roebuck. There's no fight in me. I thought there was, but there ain't. Do the best you can for me." And he took himself out of our sight.

You will wonder how I was ever able to blind myself to the reality of this frightful scene. But please remember that in this world every thought and every act is a mixture of the good and the bad; and the one or the other shows the more prominently according to one's point of view. There probably isn't a criminal in any cell, anywhere, no matter what he may say in sniveling pretense in the hope of lighter sentence, who doesn't at the bottom of his heart believe his crime or crimes somehow justifiable—and who couldn't make out a plausible case for himself.

At that time I was stuffed with the arrogance of my fancied membership in the caste of directing financial geniuses; I was looking at everything from the viewpoint of the brotherhood of which Roebuck was the strongest brother, and of which I imagined myself a full and equal member. I did not, I could not, blind myself to the vivid reminders of his relentlessness; but I knew too well how necessary the iron hand and the fixed purpose are to great affairs to judge him as infuriated Walters, with his vanity savagely wounded, was judging him. I'd as soon have thought of describing General Grant as a murderer, because he ordered the battles in which men were killed or because he planned and led the campaigns in which subordinates committed rapine and pillage and assassination. I did not then see the radical difference—did not realize that while Grant's work was at the command of patriotism and necessity, there was no necessity whatever for Roebuck's getting rich but the command of his own greedy and cruel appetites.

Don't misunderstand me. My morals are practical, not theoretical. Men must die, old customs embodied in law must be broken, the venal must be bribed and the weak cowed and compelled, in order that civilization may advance. You can't establish a railway or a great industrial system by rose-water morality. But I shall show, before I finish, that Roebuck and his gang of so-called "organizers of industry" bear about the same relation to industry that the boll weevil bears to the cotton crop.

I'll withdraw this, if any one can show me that, as the result of the activities of those parasites, anybody anywhere is using or is able to use a single pound or bushel or yard more of any commodity whatsoever. I'll withdraw it, if I can not show that but for those parasites, bearing precisely the same relation to our society that the kings and nobles and priests bore to France before the Revolution, everybody except them would have more goods and more money than they have under the system that enables these parasites to overshadow the highways of commerce with their strongholds and to clog them with their toll-gates. They know little about producing, about manufacturing, about distributing, about any process of industry. Their skill is in temptation, in trickery and in terror.

On that day, however, I sided—honestly, as I thought—with Roebuck. What I saw and heard increased my admiration of the man, my already profound respect for his master mind. And when, just after Walters went out, he leaned back in his chair and sat silent with closed eyes and moving lips, I—yes, I, Matt Blacklock, "Black Matt," as they call me—was awed in the presence of this great and good man at prayer!

How he and that God of his must have laughed at me! So infatuated was I that, clear as it is that he'd never have let me be present at such a scene without a strong ulterior motive, not until he himself long afterward made it impossible for me to deceive myself did I penetrate to his real purpose—that he wished to fill me with a prudent dread and fear of him, with a sense of the absoluteness of his power and of the hopelessness of trying to combat it. But at the time I thought—imbecile that my vanity had made me—at the time I thought he had let me be present because he genuinely liked, admired and trusted me!

Is it not amazing that one who could fall into such colossal blunders should survive to tell of them? I would not have survived had not Roebuck and his crowd been at the same time making an even more colossal misestimate of me than I was making of them. My attack of vanity was violent, but temporary; theirs was equally violent, and chronic and incurable to boot.



XII. ANITA

On my first day in long trousers I may have been more ill at ease than I was that Sunday evening at the Ellerslys'; but I doubt it.

When I came into their big drawing-room and took a look round at the assembled guests, I never felt more at home in my life. "Yes," said I to myself, as Mrs. Ellersly was greeting me and as I noted the friendly interest in the glances of the women, "this is where I belong. I'm beginning to come into my own."

As I look back on it now, I can't refrain from smiling at my own simplicity—and snobbishness. For, so determined was I to believe what I was working for was worth while, that I actually fancied there were upon these in reality ordinary people, ordinary in looks, ordinary in intelligence, some subtle marks of superiority, that made them at a glance superior to the common run. This ecstasy of snobbishness deluded me as to the women only—for, as I looked at the men, I at once felt myself their superior. They were an inconsequential, patterned lot. I even was better dressed than any of them, except possibly Mowbray Langdon; and, if he showed to more advantage than I, it was because of his manner, which, as I have probably said before, is superior to that of any human being I've ever seen—man or woman.

"You are to take Anita in," said Mrs. Ellersly. With a laughable sense that I was doing myself proud, I crossed the room easily and took my stand in front of her. She shook hands with me politely enough. Langdon was sitting beside her; I had interrupted their conversation.

"Hello, Blacklock!" said Langdon, with a quizzical, satirical smile with the eyes only. "It seems strange to see you at such peaceful pursuits." His glance traveled over me critically—and that was the beginning of my trouble. Presently, he rose, left me alone with her.

"You know Mr. Langdon?" she said, obviously because she felt she must say something.

"Oh, yes," I replied. "We are old friends. What a tremendous swell he is—really a swell." This with enthusiasm.

She made no comment. I debated with myself whether to go on talking of Langdon. I decided against it because all I knew of him had to do with matters down town—and Monson had impressed it upon me that down town was taboo in the drawing-room. I rummaged my brain in vain for another and suitable topic.

She sat, and I stood—she tranquil and beautiful and cold, I every instant more miserably self-conscious. When the start for the dining-room was made I offered her my left arm, though I had carefully planned beforehand just what I would do. She—without hesitation and, as I know now, out of sympathy for me in my suffering—was taking my wrong arm, when it flashed on me like a blinding blow in the face that I ought to be on the other side of her. I got red, tripped in the far-sprawling train of Mrs. Langdon, tore it slightly, tried to get to the other side of Miss Ellersly by walking in front of her, recovered myself somehow, stumbled round behind her, walked on her train and finally arrived at her left side, conscious in every red-hot atom of me that I was making a spectacle of myself and that the whole company was enjoying it. I must have seemed to them an ignorant boor; in fact, I had been about a great deal among people who knew how to behave, and had I never given the matter of how to conduct myself on that particular occasion an instant's thought, I should have got on without the least trouble.

It was with a sigh of profound relief that I sank upon the chair between Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon, safe from danger of making "breaks," so I hoped, for the rest of the evening. But within a very few minutes I realized that my little misadventure had unnerved me. My hands were trembling so that I could scarcely lift the soup spoon to my lips, and my throat had got so far beyond control that I had difficulty in swallowing. Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon were each busy with the man on the other side of her; I was left to my own reflections, and I was not sure whether this made me more or less uncomfortable. To add to my torment, I grew angry, furiously angry, with myself. I looked up and down and across the big table noted all these self-satisfied people perfectly at their ease; and I said to myself: "What's the matter with you, Matt? They're only men and women, and by no means the best specimens of the breed. You've got more brains than all of 'em put together, probably; is there one of the lot that could get a job at good wages if thrown on the world? What do you care what they think of you? It's a damn sight more important what you think of them; as it won't be many years before you'll hold everything they value, everything that makes them of consequence, in the hollow of your hand."

But it was of no use. When Miss Ellersly finally turned her face toward me to indicate that she would be graciously pleased to listen if I had anything to communicate, I felt as if I were slowly wilting, felt my throat contracting into a dry twist. What was the matter with me? Partly, of course, my own snobbishness, which led me to attach the same importance to those people that the snobbishness of the small and silly had got them in the way of attaching to themselves. But the chief cause of my inability was Monson and his lessons. I had thought I was estimating at its proper value what he was teaching. But so earnest and serious am I by nature, and so earnest and serious was he about those trivialities that he had been brought up to regard as the whole of life, that I had unconsciously absorbed his attitude; I was like a fellow who, after cramming hard for an examination, finds that all the questions put to him are on things he hasn't looked at. I had been making an ass of myself, and that evening I got the first instalment of my sound and just punishment. I who had prided myself on being ready for anything or anybody, I who had laughed contemptuously when I read how men and women, presented at European courts, made fools of themselves—I was made ridiculous by these people who, as I well know, had nothing to back their pretensions to superiority but a barefaced bluff.

Perhaps, had I thought this out at the table, I should have got back to myself and my normal ease; but I didn't, and that long and terrible dinner was one long and terrible agony of stage fright. When the ladies withdrew, the other men drew together, talking of people I did not know and of things I did not care about—I thought then that they were avoiding me deliberately as a flock of tame ducks avoids a wild one that some wind has accidentally blown down among them. I know now that my forbidding aspect must have been responsible for my isolations, However, I sat alone, sullenly resisting old Ellersly's constrained efforts to get me into the conversation, and angrily suspicious that Langdon was enjoying my discomfiture more than the cigarette he was apparently absorbed in.

Old Ellersly, growing more and more nervous before my dark and sullen look, finally seated himself beside me. "I hope you'll stay after the others have gone," said he. "They'll leave early, and we can have a quiet smoke and talk."

All unstrung though I was, I yet had the desperate courage to resolve that I'd not leave, defeated in the eyes of the one person whose opinion I really cared about. "Very well," said I, in reply to him.

He and I did not follow the others to the drawing-room, but turned into the library adjoining. From where I seated myself I could see part of the drawing-room—saw the others leaving, saw Langdon lingering, ignoring the impatient glances of his wife, while he talked on and on with Miss Ellersly. Her face was full toward me; she was not aware that I was looking at her, I am sure, for she did not once lift her eyes. As I sat studying her, everything else was crowded out of my mind. She was indeed wonderful—too wonderful and fine and fragile, it seemed to me at that moment, for one so plain and rough as I. "Incredible," thought I, "that she is the child of such a pair as Ellersly and his wife—but again, has she any less in common with them than she'd have with any other pair of human creatures?" Her slender white arms, her slender white shoulders, the bloom on her skin, the graceful, careless way her hair grew round her forehead and at the nape of her neck, the rather haughty expression of her small face softened into sweetness and even tenderness, now that she was talking at her ease with one whom she regarded as of her own kind—"but he isn't!" I protested to myself. "Langdon—none of these men—none of these women, is fit to associate with her. They can't appreciate her. She belongs to me who can." And I had a mad impulse then and there to seize her and bear her away—home—to the home she could make for me out of what I would shower upon her.

At last Langdon rose. It irritated me to see her color under that indifferent fascinating smile of his. It irritated me to note that he held her hand all the time he was saying good-by, and the fact that he held it as if he'd as lief not be holding it hardly lessened my longing to rush in and knock him down. What he did was all in the way of perfect good manners, and would have jarred no one not supersensitive, like me—and like his wife. I saw that she, too, was frowning. She looked beautiful that evening, in spite of her too great breadth for her height—her stoutness was not altogether a defect when she was wearing evening dress. While she seemed friendly and smiling to Miss Ellersly, I saw, whether others saw it or not, that she quivered with apprehension at his mildly flirtatious ways. He acted toward any and every attractive woman as if he were free and were regarding her as a possibility, and didn't mind if she flattered herself that he regarded her as a probability.

In an aimless sort of way Miss Ellersly, after the Langdons had disappeared, left the drawing-room by the same door. Still aimlessly wandering, she drifted into the library by the hall door. As I rose, she lifted her eyes, saw me, and drove away the frown of annoyance which came over her face like the faintest haze. In fact, it may have existed only in my imagination. She opened a large, square silver box on the table, took out a cigarette, lighted it and holding it, with the smoke lazily curling up from it, between the long slender first and second fingers of her white hand, stood idly turning the leaves of a magazine. I threw my cigar into the fireplace. The slight sound as it struck made her jump, and I saw that, underneath her surface of perfect calm, she was in a nervous state full as tense as my own.

"You smoke?" said I.

"Sometimes," she replied. "It is soothing and distracting. I don't know how it is with others, but when I smoke, my mind is quite empty."

"It's a nasty habit—smoking," said I.

"Do you think so?" said she, with the slightest lift to her tone and her eyebrows.

"Especially for a woman," I went on, because I could think of nothing else to say, and would not, at any cost, let this conversation, so hard to begin, die out.

"You are one of those men who have one code for themselves and another for women," she replied.

"I'm a man," said I. "All men have the two codes."

"Not all," said she after a pause.

"All men of decent ideas," said I with emphasis.

"Really?" said she, in a tone that irritated me by suggesting that what I said was both absurd and unimportant.

"It is the first time I've ever seen a respectable woman smoke," I went on, powerless to change the subject, though conscious I was getting tedious. "I've read of such things, but I didn't believe."

"That is interesting," said she, her tone suggesting the reverse.

"I've offended you by saying frankly what I think," said I. "Of course, it's none of my business."

"Oh, no," replied she carelessly. "I'm not in the least offended. Prejudices always interest me."

I saw Ellersly and his wife sitting in the drawing-room, pretending to talk to each other. I understood that they were leaving me alone with her deliberately, and I began to suspect she was in the plot. I smiled, and my courage and self-possession returned as summarily as they had fled.

"I'm glad of this chance to get better acquainted with you," said I. "I've wanted it ever since I first saw you."

As I put this to her directly, she dropped her eyes and murmured something she probably wished me to think vaguely pleasant.

"You are the first woman I ever knew," I went on, "with whom it was hard for me to get on any sort of terms. I suppose it's my fault. I don't know this game yet. But I'll learn it, if you'll be a little patient; and when I do, I think I'll be able to keep up my end."

She looked at me—just looked. I couldn't begin to guess what was going on in that gracefully-poised head of hers.

"Will you try to be friends with me?" said I with directness.

She continued to look at me in that same steady, puzzling way.

"Will you?" I repeated.

"I have no choice," said she slowly.

I flushed. "What does that mean?" I demanded.

She threw a hurried and, it seemed to me, frightened glance toward the drawing-room. "I didn't intend to offend you," she said in a low voice. "You have been such a good friend to papa—I've no right to feel anything but friendship for you."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," said I. And I was; for those words of hers were the first expression of appreciation and gratitude I had ever got from any member of that family which I was holding up from ruin. I put out my hand, and she laid hers in it.

"There isn't anything I wouldn't do to earn your friendship, Miss Anita," I said, holding her hand tightly, feeling how lifeless it was, yet feeling, too, as if a flaming torch were being borne through me, were lighting a fire in every vein.

The scarlet poured into her face and neck, wave on wave, until I thought it would never cease to come. She snatched her hand away and from her face streamed proud resentment. God, how I loved her at that moment!

"Anita! Mr. Blacklock!" came from the other room, in her mother's voice. "Come in here and save us old people from boring each other to sleep."

She turned swiftly and went into the other room, I following. There were a few minutes of conversation—a monologue by her mother. Then I ceased to disregard Ellersly's less and less covert yawns, and rose to take leave. I could not look directly at Anita, but I was seeing that her eyes were fixed on me, as if by some compulsion, some sinister compulsion. I left in high spirits. "No matter why or how she looks at you," said I to myself. "All that is necessary is to get yourself noticed. After that, the rest is easy. You must keep cool enough always to remember that under this glamour that intoxicates you, she's a woman, just a woman, waiting for a man."



XIII. "UNTIL TO-MORROW"

On the following Tuesday afternoon, toward five o'clock, I descended from my apartment on my way to my brougham. In the entrance hall I met Monson coming in.

"Hello, you!" said he. "Slipping away to get married?"

"No, I'm only making a call," replied I, taking alarm instantly.

"Oh, is that all?" said he with a sly grin. "It must be a mighty serious matter."

"I'm in no hurry," said I. "Come up with me for a few minutes."

As soon as we were alone in my sitting-room, I demanded: "What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing—not a thing," was his answer, in a tone I had a struggle with myself not to resent. "I've never seen any one quite so grand—top hat, latest style, long coat ditto, white buckskin waistcoat, twenty-thousand-dollar pearl in pale blue scarf, white spats, spotless varnish boots just from the varnishers, cream-colored gloves. You will make a hit! My eye, I'll bet she won't be able to resist you."

I began to shed my plumage. "I thought this was the thing when you're calling on people you hardly know."

"I should say you'd have to know 'em uncommon well to give 'em such a treat. Rather!"

"What shall I wear?" I asked. "You certainly told me the other day that this was proper."

"Proper—so it is—too damn proper," was his answer. "That'd be all right for a bridegroom or a best man or an usher—or perhaps for a wedding guest. It wouldn't do any particular harm even to call in it, if the people were used to you. But—"

"I look dressed up?"

"Like a fashion plate—like a tailor—like a society actor."

"What shall I wear?"

"Oh, just throw yourself together any old way. Business suit's good enough."

"But I barely know these people—socially. I never called there," I objected.

"Then don't call," he advised. "Send your valet in a cab to leave a card at the door. Calling has gone clean out—unless a man's got something very especial in mind. Never show that you're eager. Keep your hand hid."

"They'd know I had something especial in mind if I called?"

"Certainly, and if you'd gone in those togs, they'd have assumed you had come to—to ask the old man for his daughter—or something like that."

I lost no time in getting back into a business suit.

A week passed and, just as I was within sight of my limit of patience, Bromwell Ellersly appeared at my office. "I can't put my hand on the necessary cash, Mr. Blacklock—at least, not for a few days. Can I count on your further indulgence?" This in his best exhibit of old-fashioned courtliness—the "gentleman" through and through, ignorant of anything useful.

"Don't let that matter worry you, Ellersly," said I, friendly, for I wanted to be on a somewhat less business-like basis with that family. "The market's steady, and will go up before it goes down."

"Good!" said he. "By the way, you haven't kept your promise to call."

"I'm a busy man," said I. "You must make my excuses to your wife. But—in the evenings. Couldn't we get up a little theater-party—Mrs. Ellersly and your daughter and you and I—Sam, too, if he cares to come?"

"Delightful!" cried he.

"Whichever one of the next five evenings you say," I said. "Let me know by to-morrow morning, will you?" And we talked no more of the neglected margins; we understood each other. When he left he had negotiated a three months' loan of twenty thousand dollars.

* * * * *

They were so surprised that they couldn't conceal it, when they were ushered into my apartment on the Wednesday evening they had fixed upon. If my taste in dress was somewhat too pronounced, my taste in my surroundings was not. I suppose the same instinct that made me like the music and the pictures and the books that were the products of superior minds had guided me right in architecture, decoration and furniture. I know I am one of those who are born with the instinct for the best. Once Monson got in the way of free criticism, he indulged himself without stint, after the customary human fashion; in fact, so free did he become that had I not feared to frighten him and so bring about the defeat of my purposes, I should have sat on him hard very soon after we made our bargain. As it was, I stood his worst impudences without flinching, and partly consoled myself with the amusement I got out of watching his vanity lead him on into thinking his knowledge the most vital matter in the world—just as you sometimes see a waiter or a clerk with the air of sharing the care of the universe with the Almighty.

But even Monson could find nothing to criticize either in my apartment or in my country house. And, by the way, he showed his limitations by remarking, after he had inspected: "I must say, Blacklock, your architects and decorators have done well by you." As if a man's surroundings were not the unfailing index to himself, no matter how much money he spends or how good architects and the like he hires. As if a man could ever buy good taste.

I was pleased out of all proportion to its value by what Ellersly and his wife looked and said. But, though I watched Miss Ellersly closely, though I tried to draw from her some comment on my belongings—on my pictures, on my superb tapestries, on the beautiful carving of my furniture—I got nothing from her beyond that first look of surprise and pleasure. Her face resumed its statuelike calm, her eyes did not wander; her lips, like a crimson bow painted upon her clear, white skin, remained closed. She spoke only when she was spoken to, and then as briefly as possible. The dinner—and a mighty good dinner it was—would have been memorable for strain and silence had not Mrs. Ellersly kept up her incessant chatter. I can't recall a word she said, but I admired her for being able to talk at all. I knew she was in the same state as the rest of us, yet she acted perfectly at her ease; and not until I thought it over afterward did I realize that she had done all the talking, except answers to her occasional and cleverly-sprinkled direct questions.

Ellersly sat opposite me, and I was irritated, and thrown into confusion, too, every time I lifted my eyes, by the crushed, criminal expression of his face. He ate and drank hugely—and extremely bad manners it would have been regarded in me had I made as much noise as he, or lifted such quantities at a time into my mouth. But through his noisy gluttony he managed somehow to maintain that hang-dog air—like a thief who has gone through the house and, on his way out, has paused at the pantry, with the sack of plunder beside him, to gorge himself.

I looked at Anita several times, each time with a carefully-framed remark ready; each time I found her gaze on me—and I could say nothing, could only look away in a sort of panic. Her eyes were strangely variable. I have seen them of a gray, so pale that it was almost silver—like the steely light of the snow-line at the edge of the horizon; again, and they were so that evening, they shone with the deepest, softest blue, and made one think, as one looked at her, of a fresh violet frozen in a block of clear ice.

I sat behind her in the box at the theater. During the first and second intermissions several men dropped in to speak to her mother and her—fellows who didn't ever come down town, but I could tell they knew who I was by the way they ignored me. It exasperated me to a pitch of fury, that coldly insolent air of theirs—a jerky nod at me without so much as a glance, and no notice of me when they were leaving my box beyond a faint, supercilious smile as they passed with eyes straight ahead. I knew what it meant, what they were thinking—that the "Bucket-Shop King," as the newspapers had dubbed me, was trying to use old Ellersly's necessities as a "jimmy" and "break into society." When the curtain went down for the last intermission, two young men appeared; I did not get up as I had before, but stuck to my seat—I had reached that point at which courtesy has become cowardice.

They craned and strained at her round me and over me, presently gave up and retired, disguising their anger as contempt for the bad manners of a bounder. But that disturbed me not a ripple, the more as I was delighting in a consoling discovery. Listening and watching as she talked with these young men, whom she evidently knew well, I noted that she was distant and only politely friendly in manner habitually, that while the ice might thicken for me, it was there always. I knew enough about women to know that, if the woman who can thaw only for one man is the most difficult, she is also the most constant. "Once she thaws toward me!" I said to myself.

When the young men had gone, I leaned forward until my head was close to hers, to her hair—fine, soft, abundant, electric hair. Like the infatuated fool that I was, I tore out all the pigeon-holes of my brain in search of something to say to her, something that would start her to thinking well of me. She must have felt my breath upon her neck, for she moved away slightly, and it seemed to me a shiver visibly passed over that wonderful white skin of hers.

I drew back and involuntarily said, "Beg pardon." I glanced at her mother and it was my turn to shudder. I can't hope to give an accurate impression of that stony, mercenary, mean face. There are looks that paint upon the human countenance the whole of a life, as a flash of lightning paints upon the blackness of the night miles on miles of landscape. That look of Mrs. Ellersly's—stern disapproval at her daughter, stern command that she be more civil, that she unbend—showed me the old woman's soul. And I say that no old harpy presiding over a dive is more full of the venom of the hideous calculations of the market for flesh and blood than is a woman whose life is wrapped up in wealth and show.

"If you wish it," I said, on impulse, to Miss Ellersly in a low voice, "I shall never try to see you again."

I could feel rather than see the blood suddenly beating in her skin, and there was in her voice a nervousness very like fright as she answered: "I'm sure mama and I shall be glad to see you whenever you come."

"You?" I persisted.

"Yes," she said, after a brief hesitation.

"Glad?" I persisted.

She smiled—the faintest change in the perfect curve of her lips. "You are very persistent, aren't you?"

"Very," I answered. "That is why I have always got whatever I wanted."

"I admire it," said she.

"No, you don't," I replied. "You think it is vulgar, and you think I am vulgar because I have that quality—that and some others."

She did not contradict me.

"Well, I am vulgar—from your standpoint," I went on. "I have purposes and passions. And I pursue them. For instance, you."

"I?" she said tranquilly.

"You," I repeated. "I made up my mind the first day I saw you that I'd make you like me. And—you will."

"That is very flattering," said she. "And a little terrifying. For"—she faltered, then went bravely on—"I suppose there isn't anything you'd stop at in order to gain your end."

"Nothing," said I, and I compelled her to meet my gaze.

She drew a long breath, and I thought there was a sob in it—like a frightened child.

"But I repeat," I went on, "that if you wish it, I shall never try to see you again. Do you wish it?"

"I—don't—know," she answered slowly. "I think—not."

As she spoke the last word, she lifted her eyes to mine with a look of forced friendliness in them that I'd rather not have seen there. I wished to be blind to her defects, to the stains and smutches with which her surroundings must have sullied her. And that friendly look seemed to me an unmistakable hypocrisy in obedience to her mother. However, it had the effect of bringing her nearer to my own earthy level, of putting me at ease with her; and for the few remaining minutes we talked freely, I indifferent whether my manners and conversation were correct. As I helped her into their carriage, I pressed her arm slightly, and said in a voice for her only, "Until to-morrow."



XIV. FRESH AIR IN A GREENHOUSE

At five the next day I rang the Ellerslys' bell, was taken through the drawing-room into that same library. The curtains over the double doorway between the two rooms were almost drawn. She presently entered from the hall. I admired the picture she made in the doorway—her big hat, her embroidered dress of white cloth, and that small, sweet, cold face of hers. And as I looked, I knew that nothing, nothing—no, not even her wish, her command—could stop me from trying to make her my own. That resolve must have shown in my face—it or the passion that inspired it—for she paused and paled.

"What is it?" I asked. "Are you afraid of me?"

She came forward proudly, a fine scorn in her eyes. "No," she said. "But if you knew, you might be afraid of me."

"I am," I confessed. "I am afraid of you because you inspire in me a feeling that is beyond my control. I've committed many follies in my life—I have moods in which it amuses me to defy fate. But those follies have always been of my own willing. You"—I laughed—"you are a folly for me. But one that compels me."

She smiled—not discouragingly—and seated herself on a tiny sofa in the corner, a curiously impregnable intrenchment, as I noted—for my impulse was to carry her by storm. I was astonished at my own audacity; I was wondering where my fear of her had gone, my awe of her superior fineness and breeding. "Mama will be down in a few minutes," she said.

"I didn't come to see your mother," replied I. "I came to see you."

She flushed, then froze—and I thought I had once more "got upon" her nerves with my rude directness. How eagerly sensitive our nerves are to bad impressions of one we don't like, and how coarsely insensible to bad impressions of one we do like!



"I see I've offended again, as usual," said I. "You attach so much importance to petty little dancing-master tricks and caperings. You live—always have lived—in an artificial atmosphere. Real things act on you like fresh air on a hothouse flower."

"You are—fresh air?" she inquired, with laughing sarcasm.

"I am that," retorted I. "And good for you—as you'll find when you get used to me."

I heard voices in the next room—her mother's and some man's. We waited until it was evident we were not to be disturbed. As I realized that fact and surmised its meaning, I looked triumphantly at her. She drew further back into her corner, and the almost stern firmness of her contour told me she had set her teeth.

"I see you are nerving yourself," said I with a laugh. "You are perfectly certain I am going to propose to you."

She flamed scarlet and half-started up.

"Your mother—in the next room—expects it, too," I went on, laughing even more disagreeably. "Your parents need money—they have decided to sell you, their only large income-producing asset. And I am willing to buy. What do you say?"

I was blocking her way out of the room. She was standing, her breath coming fast, her eyes blazing. "You are—frightful!" she exclaimed in a low voice.

"Because I am frank, because I am honest? Because I want to put things on a sound basis? I suppose, if I came lying and pretending, and let you lie and pretend, and let your parents and Sam lie and pretend, you would find me—almost tolerable. Well, I'm not that kind. When there's no especial reason one way or the other, I'm willing to smirk and grimace and dodder and drivel, like the rest of your friends, those ladies and gentlemen. But when there's business to be transacted, I am business-like. Let's not begin with your thinking you are deceiving me, and so hating me and despising me and trying to keep up the deception. Let's begin right."

She was listening; she was no longer longing to fly from the room; she was curious. I knew I had scored.

"In any event," I continued, "you would have married for money. You've been brought up to it, like all these girls of your set. You'd be miserable without luxury. If you had your choice between love without luxury and luxury without love, it'd be as easy to foretell which you'd do as to foretell how a starving poet would choose between a loaf of bread and a volume of poems. You may love love; but you love life—your kind of life—better!"

She lowered her head. "It is true," she said. "It is low and vile, but it is true."

"Your parents need money—" I began.

She stopped me with a gesture. "Don't blame them," she pleaded. "I am more guilty than they."

I was proud of her as she made that confession. "You have the making of a real woman in you," said I. "I should have wanted you even if you hadn't. But what I now see makes what I thought a folly of mine look more like wisdom."

"I must warn you," she said, and now she was looking directly at me, "I shall never love you."

"Never is a long time," replied I. "I'm old enough to be cynical about prophecy."

"I shall never love you," she repeated. "For many reasons you wouldn't understand. For one you will understand."

"I understand the 'many reasons' you say are beyond me," said I. "For, dear young lady, under this coarse exterior I assure you there's hidden a rather sharp outlook on human nature—and—well, nerves that respond to the faintest changes in you as do mine can't be altogether without sensitiveness. What's the other reason—the reason? That you think you love some one else?"

"Thank you for saying it for me," she replied.

You can't imagine how pleased I was at having earned her gratitude, even in so little a matter. "I have thought of that," said I. "It is of no consequence."

"But you don't understand," she pleaded earnestly.

"On the contrary, I understand perfectly," I assured her. "And the reason I am not disturbed is—you are here, you are not with him."

She lowered her head so that I had no view of her face.

"You and he do not marry," I went on, "because you are both poor?"

"No," she replied.

"Because he does not care for you?"

"No—not that," she said.

"Because you thought he hadn't enough for two?"

A long pause, then—very faintly: "No—not that."

"Then it must be because he hasn't as much money as he'd like, and must find a girl who'll bring him—what he most wants."

She was silent.

"That is, while he loves you dearly, he loves money more. And he's willing to see you go to another man, be the wife of another man, be—everything to another man." I laughed. "I'll take my chances against love of that sort."

"You don't understand," she murmured. "You don't realize—there are many things that mean nothing to you and that mean—oh, so much to people brought up as we are."

"Nonsense!" said I. "What do you mean by 'we'? Nature has been bringing us up for a thousand thousand years. A few years of silly false training doesn't undo her work. If you and he had cared for each other, you wouldn't be here, apologizing for his selfish vanity."

"No matter about him," she cried impatiently, lifting her head haughtily. "The point is, I love him—and always shall. I warn you."

"And I take you at my own risk?"

Her look answered "Yes!"

"Well,"—and I took her hand—"then, we are engaged."

Her whole body grew tense, and her hand chilled as it lay in mine. "Don't—please don't," I said gently. "I'm not so bad as all that. If you will be as generous with me as I shall be with you, neither of us will ever regret this."

There were tears on her cheeks as I slowly released her hand.

"I shall ask nothing of you that you are not ready freely to give," I said.

Impulsively she stood and put out her hand, and the eyes she lifted to mine were shining and friendly. I caught her in my arms and kissed her—not once but many times. And it was not until the chill of her ice-like face had cooled me that I released her, drew back red and ashamed and stammering apologies. But her impulse of friendliness had been killed; she once more, as I saw only too plainly, felt for me that sense of repulsion, felt for herself that sense of self-degradation.

"I can not marry you!" she muttered.

"You can—and will—and must," I cried, infuriated by her look.

There was a long silence. I could easily guess what was being fought out in her mind. At last she slowly drew herself up. "I can not refuse," she said, and her eyes sparkled with defiance that had hate in it. "You have the power to compel me. Use it, like the brute you refuse to let me forget that you are." She looked so young, so beautiful, so angry—and so tempting.

"So I shall!" I answered. "Children have to be taught what is good for them. Call in your mother, and we'll tell her the news."

Instead, she went into the next room. I followed, saw Mrs. Ellersly seated at the tea-table in the corner farthest from the library where her daughter and I had been negotiating. She was reading a letter, holding her lorgnon up to her painted eyes.

"Won't you give us tea, mother?" said Anita, on her surface not a trace of the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.

"Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly," said I. "Your daughter has consented to marry me."

Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry—real tears. And for a moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when she spoke, that delusion vanished.

"You must forgive me, Mr. Blacklock," she said in her hard, smooth, politic voice. "It is the shock of realizing I'm about to lose my daughter." And I knew that her tears were from joy and relief—Anita had "come up to the scratch;" the hideous menace of "genteel poverty" had been averted.

"Do give us tea, mama," said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my passion was picturing.



XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER

But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly shape of cynicism had disappeared.

"It was a shadow I myself cast upon her," I assured myself; and once more she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains. "I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom," thought I. Mystery there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty and purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showed at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl embodied that ideal.

"If you'd only give up your cigarettes," I remember saying to her when we were a little better acquainted, "you'd be perfect."

She made an impatient gesture. "Don't!" she commanded almost angrily. "You make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be content with woman as she is—a human being? And—how could I—any woman not an idiot—be alive for twenty-five years without learning—a thing or two? Why should any man want it?"

"Because to know is to be spattered and stained," said I. "I get enough of people who know, down-town. Up-town—I want a change of air. Of course, you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean and—and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to restrain myself from rushing away."

She looked at me critically.

"You've never had much to do with women, have you?" she finally said slowly in a musing tone.

"I wish that were true—almost," replied I, on my mettle as a man, and resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague "confessions"—boastings disguised as penitential admissions—after the customary masculine fashion.

She smiled—and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. "A man and a woman can be a great deal to each other, I believe," said she; "can be—married, and all that—and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met—more hopelessly strangers."

"There's always a sort of mystery," I conceded. "I suppose that's one of the things that keep married people interested."

She shrugged her shoulders—she was in evening dress, I recall, and there was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on the new snow when the sun comes out.

"Mystery!" she said impatiently. "There's no mystery except what we ourselves make. It's useless—perfectly useless," she went on absently. "You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed friendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd punish her for it by—by despising her."

I smiled, much as one smiles at the efforts of a precocious child to prove that it is a Methuselah in experience.

"If you weren't like an angel in comparison with the others I've known," said I, "do you suppose I could care for you as I do?"

I saw my remark irritated her, and I fancied it was her vanity that was offended by my disbelief in her knowledge of life. I hadn't a suspicion that I had hurt and alienated her by slamming in her very face the door of friendship and frankness her honesty was forcing her to try to open for me.

In my stupidity of imagining her not human like the other women and the men I had known, but a creature apart and in a class apart, I stood day after day gaping at that very door, and wondering how I could open it, how penetrate even to the courtyard of that vestal citadel. So long as my old-fashioned belief that good women were more than human and bad women less than human had influenced me only to a sharper lookout in dealing with the one species of woman I then came in contact with, no harm to me resulted, but on the contrary good—whoever got into trouble through walking the world with sword and sword arm free? But when, under the spell of Anita Ellersly, I dragged the "superhuman goodness" part of my theory down out of the clouds and made it my guardian and guide—really, it's a miracle that I escaped from the pit into which that lunacy pitched me headlong. I was not content with idealizing only her; I went on to seeing good, and only good, in everybody! The millennium was at hand; all Wall Street was my friend; whatever I wanted would happen. And when Roebuck, with an air like a benediction from a bishop backed by a cathedral organ and full choir, gave me the tip to buy coal stocks, I canonized him on the spot. Never did a Jersey "jay" in Sunday clothes and tallowed boots respond to a bunco steerer's greeting with a gladder smile than mine to that pious old past-master of craft.

I will say, in justice to myself, though it is also in excuse, that if I had known him intimately a few years earlier, I should have found it all but impossible to fool myself. For he had not long been in a position where he could keep wholly detached from the crimes committed for his benefit and by his order, and where he could disclaim responsibility and even knowledge. The great lawyers of the country have been most ingenious in developing corporate law in the direction of making the corporation a complete and secure shield between the beneficiary of a crime and its consequences; but before a great financier can use this shield perfectly, he must build up a system—he must find lieutenants with the necessary coolness, courage and cunning; he must teach them to understand his hints; he must educate them, not to point out to him the disagreeable things involved in his orders, but to execute unquestioningly, to efface completely the trail between him and them, whether or not they succeed in covering the roundabout and faint trail between themselves and the tools that nominally commit the crimes.

As nearly as I can get at it, when Roebuck was luring me into National Coal he had not for nine years been open to attack, but had so far hedged himself in that, had his closest lieutenants been trapped and frightened into "squealing," he would not have been involved; without fear of exposure and with a clear conscience he could—and would!—have joined in the denunciation of the man who had been caught, and could—and would!—have helped send him to the penitentiary or to the scaffold. With the security of an honest man and the serenity of a Christian he planned his colossal thefts and reaped their benefits; and whenever he was accused, he could have explained everything, could have got his accuser's sympathy and admiration. I say, could have explained; but he would not. Early in his career, he had learned the first principle of successful crime—silence. No matter what the provocation or the seeming advantage, he uttered only a few generous general phrases, such as "those misguided men," or "the Master teaches us to bear with meekness the calumnies of the wicked," or "let him that is without sin cast the first stone." As to the crime itself—silence, and the dividends.

A great man, Roebuck! I doff my hat to him. Of all the dealers in stolen goods under police protection, who so shrewd as he?

Wilmot was the instrument he employed to put the coal industry into condition for "reorganization." He bought control of one of the coal railroads and made Wilmot president of it. Wilmot, taught by twenty years of his service, knew what was expected of him, and proceeded to do it. He put in a "loyal" general freight agent who also needed no instructions, but busied himself at destroying his own and all the other coal roads by a system of secret rebates and rate cuttings. As the other roads, one by one, descended toward bankruptcy, Roebuck bought the comparatively small blocks of stock necessary to give him control of them. When he had power over enough of them to establish a partial monopoly of transportation in and out of the coal districts, he was ready for his lieutenant to attack the mining properties. Probably his orders to Wilmot were nothing more definite or less innocent than: "Wilmot, my boy, don't you think you and I and some others of our friends ought to buy some of those mines, if they come on the market at a fair price? Let me know when you hear of any attractive investments of that sort."